https://www.rutgers.edu/news/rutgers-scholar-receives-prize-revolutionizing-how-we-look-aztec-societyWhen Camilla Townsend set out to tell the story of the Aztecs, the Indigenous population of central Mexico whose government was wiped out following the arrival of Spanish explorers, she began a project that challenged previous beliefs about their lives.
For 500 years, understanding of the Aztec people was based on accounts written by their conquerors, or sometimes by Indigenous people answering leading questions put to them by Spanish historians. These accounts contained misinterpretations, now widely taught in schools as “facts,” including that the Aztecs were obsessed with death, and that they thought the Spanish conquistadors were gods.
But Townsend, a Distinguished Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers-New Brunswick, realized that to gain an accurate understanding of native populations, research should focus on what the people said about themselves in their own language when they were in the privacy of their own homes, addressing themselves to their own descendants.
...
“Camilla Townsend revolutionizes how we should look at Aztec society before, during and after the arrival of Europeans in Central America,” said Peter Francopan, the prize’s 2020 jury chair. “After more than 500 years, we are finally able to see history through the eyes of the Indigenous people themselves rather than those of their conquerors. Not many books completely transform how we look at the past. This is one of those that does.”
This is what we need more of.
“I found some surprises in what they wrote. For instance, there is absolutely no evidence that anyone thought Cortés, or any other Spaniard, was a god returning from the east. That story, as it turns out, comes initially from Spanish comments made later in the century,” she said.
I suspected as much.
The Nahuatl sources portray Cortéz and the Spanish as powerful men who ****, burned and killed with impunity and whose metal weapons, gunpowder and smallpox overwhelmed Moctezuma’s efforts to fight them off or trade gold for peace, Townsend says.
In other words, Nahuatl sources portray Cortez & Co. as Westerners. Which is what they were. (Cortez was also Jewish. In fact he was Pizarro's cousin!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hern%C3%A1n_Cort%C3%A9sThrough his mother, Hernán was second cousin once removed of Francisco Pizarro, who later conquered the Inca Empire of modern-day Peru, and not to be confused with another Francisco Pizarro, who joined Cortés to conquer the Aztecs.
Colonialism runs in their family! This is it is so important to exterminate colonialist bloodlines.
Back to the article:
Townsend is currently studying the traditions of the Lenape, or Delaware, people who were indigenous to New Jersey but who in the 18th century were pushed out by European colonists and now live in Oklahoma.
Keep up the good work!
But although we have finally cleared up that the Aztecs did not think Cortez was a god, it unfortunately remains reality that too many of their present-day descendants think present-day "whites" are gods:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/psychological-decolonization/and want to reproduce with them:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/reproductive-decolonization/We are here to change this.
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